Posted by Send your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.)
Chuck writes…
Malahide, cricket and I can only mean two of two things: rain, and an abandoned match.
I did get to see some cricket, though.
As you can see from the below, Dolly Parton (for it is she) has got herself into an awful position trying to play a shot off Colourful Caterpillar’s wily bowling….
… but (see below, again) somehow Dolly has worked it off her pads for somewhere between “nine to five” runs, judging by the reactions of just about everybody.
It was, quite frankly, a ridiculous shot in the wet conditions, which really demanded a bit more patience on Dolly’s part. I don’t know what the selectors will think of that.
Anyway.
Dolly Parton. At the actual cricket. In wet Malahide.
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Excellent match report.
Were I the headline writer for this site, I’d have gone for “Ireland In The Stream”. An opportunity missed there, I feel, KC.
A touch of the Joe Root about Dolly’s shot…I have seen Joe lean into the ball that way.
I’ll get my coat – looks like I’d need it in Malahide.
That’s good. We’re consumed by regret now.
Ollie Pope plays that one too. We can visualise him as the ball sails to the boundary or detonates off stump.
I’m begging of you, please don’t take my man (of the match award)
Fun story (on a not-very-fun day here in Manchester): I was going to order that new book about the 50 most ridiculous Ashes of the last 50 years, or whatever it’s called, this morning but then I got an email saying I had been ‘successful’ in the ballot for England v Pakistan at Headingley next year and exhorting me to ‘be quick’ in ‘securing’ the tickets I had presumably had set aside for me, as you’d expect in a ballot
This ‘success’ didn’t seem to involve any tickets being set aside though, rather it involved being sent a link that went to a page with a circle that span round for about 20 mins and a message telling me not to leave the page lest I be exiled to the back of the queue, before starting a countdown for another 15 mins that when it got to 00:00 allowed me to look at what tickets were available (which weren’t all that many) and then, eventually, buy some. So basically like when tickets just go on general sale, but with more time pressure
Unfortunately all the booking fees you have to pay for the privilege of paying for your ticket have eroded my book buying funds for today but I will definitely try and pre-order the 50 Most Ashes of all the 50 Years of the Ashes as soon as I get paid again
Believe it or not, this is a much-simplified version of the ticket-buying experience which included a failed attempt at a password reset, setting up a new account, two conversations on the phone with someone of advanced years who struggled to articulate what they could see on the screen while booking without extensive use of the phrase ‘…and now it’s telling me…’ and forgetting that someone on the end of a phone can’t see the screen that is being described.
Textbook stuff. We can only pray that the book buying experience proves less gruelling whenever you’ve regained the strength and capital needed to make another purchase.
Just imagine being in an industry where making sales was of such little concern that you could merrily allow the process to be so arduous without care for the consequences.